How Old is That Building?

One of the areas that is captured the most is Broadgate but working out which pre photography images are genuine is very frustrating. One of the first you, and certainly I came across, is this one of the Cross. Courtesy of our Rob via Coventry Digital, I love it but it's entirely fake. Even the Cross itself is a mediocre copy of genuine sketches. The styling of the buildings is somewhat off and the building on the right looks positively French. You can detect building differences between various regions of the country. Coventry's ancient buildings more closely resemble those in Suffolk and Kent than say Cheshire or Lancashire. Despite local styles, you'll often see modern computer games showing distinctly European medieval buildings, when the locations are supposed to be English. When did you see a castle built out of red sandstone in a reconstruction, and yet one of the most interesting ones, Kenilworth, is most definitely a red head.

You are quite right Helen, as Rolph Hellberg, who was the architect of the Cross replica, told me this one you have shown was so inaccurate it would never stand up. Presumably artistic licence is the reason!

A good example of fake buildings below. They do a fairly good job of pretending to be modernised Georgian buildings. However looking at the maps it's possible to determine that they didn't exist until Corporation Street was built. They were right on the corner of Fleet Street. The route now blocked here. Built after 1937 but there by 1939.

An example of what looks like a brick building but probably started out as timber is the following from West Orchard. The potential clue that it was much older is the Troughton sketch of the front, showing diamond leaded glass in the mid level windows. To add to the evidence that it was an early timber building the Goad Fire Insurance map denotes that east half was a mix of brick and timber. I assume that the reason it doesn't specify the same for the other half is because it wasn't one of their properties. Looking at the back, it seems like you can see evidence of the internal timbers? The Fire insurance maps are very useful finding the early timber buildings although they don't pinpoint all of them. Is it likely that the west side of this building wasn't built at the same time as the east side? No. To see how the building might have originally looked, you only have to turn to the west to its neighbour. It seems that when they wanted to 'improve' a timber building, they had a choice to make when it came to where they started the new brick wall. A common habit was to use the front of the second storey as the guide. For a jettied building, that meant pulling out the ground floor and cutting off any upper levels. This would mean that the pavement got narrower, although sometimes the pavement had already been obstructed by goods and perhaps even a little extension. Shops would have originally had shutters that swung down to create sales counters, so the space was already in use by the business. You can see the effect of the changed street line in the map above. The ancient timber buildings to the east are set back slightly from the brick fronted buildings to the west. In much later years, that built out front could readily take a large glass display window, because the floor above was already supported by the original jetty. Only the weight of the brick front needed to be supported by a beam. Often the original door location stayed in the same place, creating a distinctive recess, framed by glass display spaces. Whether by habit or because it was useful as a porch, the recess was duplicated in later brick built shops. Why were many of these buildings not flagged as ancient before they were demolished? I think the reason is that until dendrochronology, they just didn't know how old they were. There was a fair bit of recycling and repair, so it was hard to tell whether an old piece of wood was in its original location.

In the early 1900s there was a burst of interest in the medieval/Tudor/Elizabethan. They were refurbishing some of the original timber buildings and constructing new mock Tudor properties. There was a lot of work done on the Spon chapel (for which there are some excellent drawings at the Hebert). Dovecot House on the corner of Derby Lane and the Spicerstoke was going to be improved and would be complimented by the newly built Prudential building on the corner with Broadgate. That in turn book ended the view of Trinity church with what is now Wetherspoon's Flying Standard on the corner of Priory Row. Smithford Street saw a number of updated timber buildings. The first photo shows a group that were all timber framed, including the Lion Stores, but the nearest building had been brick faced and had lost its gables and jetties (done in the 1800s). The second photo shows the mock timber makeover of the 1900s to the Lion Stores. The building didn't survive the city's desire to modernise however and was replaced before the war, as can be seen by this photo of the bomb damage. More to follow.